How Do You Outsource Something You Don’t Understand?

Welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing podcast that's dedicated to making you better at working with OFS online Filipino specialists. This is episode 178, how to outsource things you don't know how to do. So to me, I mean, I hope you know this. I talk about this all the time. To me, the best, fastest way to succeed with outsourcing is to get stuff off of your plate. Outsource things you do know how to do. That way, you know, you. You know exactly what you're looking for, you know who to hire, you know their skills, you know the feedback to provide, you know the training you can provide. It makes everything so much easier. But what about, okay, so the first person you hired is someone to do something you do know how to do. You get something off of your plate, what's next? So now, I mean, for a lot of people, you can get something else off of your plate that works really well, but what about the things that you don't know how to do? So I'm going to talk through that a little bit today. So the first question is something you, you don't know how to do. Can you give this to your current OFS or should you hire someone else? And that depends on, is it a small tas, is there training available for you, which you could use one, or vasmadeasy.com or is it something that your OFS has time to do and they've shown interest and maybe they know how to do. So in that case, I think it's really great to give that to your ofs, especially if it's something they know how to do, something maybe they've expressed interest in or they've told you, hey, I also can, whatever. If you have no idea how to do that and you trust this person, turn it over to them. Or if it's a small task and they don't know how to do it, but you can provide them training from somewhere else, maybe from. Maybe from vasmadeasy.com then I think it's super reasonable and actually really desirable to give it to someone that you already trust. You know what their output looks like, you know who they are, you know if they fail, you know why you already have a relationship with that person. So then here's another situation. So when we started doing social media marketing, which I don't know, it's been a lot of years, but my team came to me and said, hey, sir, you're not doing this, you should be doing this. And I said no, because it was something I didn't know how to do. And they came back to me and said, yeah, well, we think you should be doing it. And let us show you. Let us give you a proposal of how to do this. And they gave me some proposals, and I didn't like some of it, and I did like some of it. And so that's how we've done social media. My team said, hey, we think we can do this. I let them run with it. And for the most part, I have touched very little over the years. I don't know how many people that have. Have liked our Facebook or whatever it is. It's hundreds of thousands of people that I've never made a single post. And so it's something that I don't know how to do. But they did know how to do, people on my team. So a couple thoughts with this. Number one, I will usually ask them to give me, like, a summary, like what? Or a proposal. What do you propose that we should do? And from there I'll whittle it down or I'll add to it or say, okay, I like this, or I don't like that. Then I will ask them for what are you actually going to do now? Like, show me an example of the work that you're going to do. Show me how it's going to be done. How is this actually going to work in practice? That's the next step of select the proposal from them that I get to modify, and then the actual work that's going to get done that I get to look at before it gets published somewhere. And we've almost always, every time we've done this, we've gone back and forth on like, how is this gonna work? How are you doing this? I don't really understand it. So I'm kind of limited in what I can say yes or no to, but there are certainly things that I can say like, oh, yeah, I do like this, or I don't like that. And that has always been part of it. This is also one of the reasons why we created VASmadeasy.com, which is to provide training to people that you already have so that you can give them things that you don't know how to do. The training is done specifically intended for a Filipino virtual assistant so that they don't disappear fil from you so you could provide them these things and have them do things that you don't know how to do, and they can be productive for you and effective at it. Okay, so the next part of this is what about something that you, you don't have someone on your team to do? Something that you don't know how to do, something that someone on your team doesn't know how to do. You don't have training for it, like hiring someone technical, how do you do this? So I will start by saying first that I graduated computer science so hiring technical people for me programmers is reasonable, I understand it. But there are other things I don't understand design super well. But design is kind of one that a technical thing that you can look and see like oh, do I like the designs that they've done or not? So I can look at portfolios when making a decision on a designer. What about like Facebook ads? Something that you don't know, something that you don't know how to do. Something that I don't know how to do and my technical experience has taken does not help me with it. How do you hire for that? So here's what I do. First thing I do is research. Like I will ask someone who understands it, point me in the right direction. What am I looking for? What skills am I looking for? Especially if it's like for most of you, if you're hiring a programmer or you want a web project done or an app project done or something like that, like what are the skills I'm looking for? What's the technology here? Ask a friend, ask two friends, ask whoever you can like point me in the right direction here. After that I'll usually do a little bit of research. I just want to understand some of it because when I'm hiring someone, the more I can understand ahead of time, the more likely I am to have a long term solution from there. So now I understand a little bit. The next step for me is to go look at profiles on onlinejobs ph based off of the knowledge that I've gained already. So it's always interesting that you can gain so much knowledge about this just by looking at the skills that you're finding on onlinejobs ph. Like you'll, you'll see, oh, I see this skill and this skill together. That must be how this works. Or I see this skill and this skill and here's this other person with this thing and that person I talked to mentioned this other thing. So that's pretty good. It's really interesting. Just what you'll learn in looking at profiles. So that's my next step is go into onlinejobs ph and look at profiles and see what you find. Then I'm gonna post a Job with the best description I can. And usually I'm gonna ask applicants to write a proposal for me. I'm gonna say, like, how would you do this? Because I don't know how to do it. I'm tell them up front I don't know what I'm doing here. Well, that will weed out people that are looking for your direction. And that's. So I think that's a really good way to approach this. So here's my last piece of advice in this. Typically, the more experience someone has, the easier this is going to be for you. And then the more experience someone has, the more expensive they are. And that's just how it is. So when you're looking to hire someone to do something you don't know how to do, typically what I've seen is the more more you pay, the better of an experience you're going to have, the better they're going to be at knowing what to do. Might be a good weed out way to. You don't want to hire someone, someone who's super inexpensive because they are not going to solve the problem for you the way that you want it solved. It's not always the case and it's not what you want to hear, but in my experience, it's, it's better, it's better that way. So then once I found the people, you know, I've settled on a good person, I'm going to ask them now. I want you to give me a plan for how is this gonna work. And then here's the last thing that I that I will look at. If I don't understand the plan, this probably isn't a good fit. Like, even if I don't, if I don't know if I don't understand Facebook ads, I'm hiring someone to do Facebook ads for me. But I don't understand at all what you're telling me to do or what you're telling me you're gonna do. Well, man, this is so questionable. I have no idea if what you're doing is reasonable or not. And I would have to go to someone else and ask them, and I don't really want to do that. I'm gonna ask someone else, like, give me a plan. And if I find that multiple people are giving me a similar plan, then I have a pretty good idea. Yep. Okay, that's probably how it is and I don't understand it, but that's probably how it's supposed to be anyway. So that's gonna be my last step in outsourcing something that I don't know how to do in hiring someone to do that thing is, what's the plan? Do I understand it if I don't understand it? I want to get a plan from multiple people, because then it's either going to solidify the plan that I don't understand, or I'm going to find a plan that I do understand. And that's a much, much better solution for me is if I understand what's going to happen in the end. This isn't easy. It's not easy to get something done that you don't know how to do. It requires more management on your part and managing something that you don't understand. And that is. It's just hard. It's doable. It's not impossible. It's just harder.